Below is the complete list of Stuart Gibbs’ FunJungle books in order of publication. This is the recommended reading sequence for the series.
FunJungle Books
- Belly Up (2010)
View Book - Poached (2014)
View Book - Big Game (2015)
View Book - Panda-monium (2017)
View Book - Lion Down (2019)
View Book - Tyrannosaurus Wrecks (2020)
View Book - Bear Bottom (2021)
View Book - Whale Done (2023)
View Book - All Ears (2025)
View Book - Ape Escape (2026)
View Book
About FunJungle
Stuart Gibbs’s FunJungle books take a simple premise and make it work remarkably hard: what if the world’s biggest zoo were also a perfect place for crimes, cover-ups, and a very smart kid to investigate them? The series follows middle school sleuth Teddy Fitzroy as he solves mysteries at FunJungle, “the nation’s largest zoo,” and that really is the center of the appeal. These are animal-rich mysteries with a comic tone, but they are also real puzzle stories built around a sharply observant main character.
Teddy Fitzroy is what holds the series together. He is not a zoo employee in any formal sense, and he is not a conventional amateur detective either. He is the kid who notices what adults miss, asks the inconvenient question, and keeps pushing even when people in charge would rather a mystery disappear. The books are built around Teddy’s unusual talent for solving crimes in a place full of animals, tourists, handlers, executives, and hidden tensions. That gives the series a strong dual engine: part wildlife adventure, part whodunit.
The series begins with Belly Up (2010), then continues with Poached (2014), Big Game (2015), Panda-monium (2017), Lion Down (2019), Tyrannosaurus Wrecks (2020), Bear Bottom (2021), Whale Done (2023), All Ears (2025), and Ape Escape (2026). The line is still expanding, which says a lot about how durable the concept has become.
What makes publication order matter here is not that the books are impossible to follow out of sequence, but that FunJungle itself becomes richer over time. The early books establish the environment and Teddy’s role inside it. Later books build on that foundation by deepening the recurring relationships, widening the kinds of crimes Teddy faces, and making the zoo feel less like a one-book gimmick and more like a lived-in ecosystem with politics, money pressures, endangered animals, and competing agendas. Read in order, the series develops naturally from a clever opener into a much broader comic mystery world.
Another big part of the series’ success is tone. These books are funny without becoming weightless, and they are educational without feeling like assignments. Gibbs has a real gift for folding animal facts into plot. The stories do not stop to lecture, but readers still come away knowing more about zoo life, animal behavior, and conservation than they expected when they started.
The setting does a lot of work too. A giant zoo gives Gibbs endless variety: different habitats, different species, celebrity animals, backstage operations, large crowds, and major consequences when something goes wrong. That flexibility is a big reason the series avoids feeling repetitive even though the core setup stays stable. A mystery involving a rhino, a panda, a lion, a dinosaur attraction, a whale, or a baby gorilla can each feel distinct while still belonging to the same world.
For readers who already have the title list above, the main thing to know is that FunJungle is one of Stuart Gibbs’s most durable series because it balances accessibility with smart construction. Teddy Fitzroy is easy to like, the mysteries are real mysteries, and the zoo setting gives the books more personality than a generic school or neighborhood series ever could. In publication order, you get to watch both Teddy and FunJungle grow into something larger, stranger, and more entertaining than the premise first suggests.